F.I.U. Library Home

About F.I.U. Libraries

Research

Online Legal Research

A guide for students doing research in law-related subject courses

A complete listing of law-related databases and their links may be found on the F.I.U. Library's website at Business Law.  Click the "All" tab for a complete list, or look at the "Main" and "Specialized" lists separately.

There are two main law databases for U.S. law.  Lexis/Nexis (L/N) and WestLaw have somewhat restrictive versions available to non-College of Law students, namely Lexis-Nexis Academic and Westlaw Campus Research.  Both databases cover statutes and cases for all 50 states and the U.S. federal government.

Lexis/Nexis Academic database does not cover any state administrative codes.  Shepards (the original inventor of citation indexing/searching) is sometimes limited in its usablility.  All searches default to the last 2 years unless you remember to change that factor, which can lead to poor results.  (Unless you are looking for a specific case or the most recent form of a statute, you should always set the time to "all years available.")  Another default is to law journals; if you are searching cases or statutes, you need to select the appropriate collection along the left margin.  Being familiar with connectors and search strategy in general will go a long way toward effective searching in this set of databases.  Critical:  When starting L/N Academic, you are entering a hodgepodge of legal, news, and other resources.  Click the Legal tab at the top of the page, rather than clicking the checkoff box lower down.  Clicking the tab will put the legal search screen up, with the various options made available there.  Search results default to citation view; select KWIC for easier evaluation of relevancy.  Only at the full record does the citation indicate by colored symbol whether the case law has been challenged (Yellow) or overturned (Red.)  L/N covers Canadian and E.U. laws in addition to U.S.

Westlaw Campus Research database includes the state administrative codes for approximately 44 states, including Florida.  You must select at least one database from within the list at the bottom of the page; you may select several.  Also notice the column to the left; as you do searches this column will usually change to reflect some options (such as key citation searching) for next steps.  A Yellow or Red flag by the case name indicates some negative review or overturning; be wary with these cases.  A Blue H indicates the case has a "history" and is still "good" law.  Examine the history carefully for its significance.  You may examine the history of any case by clicking on the flag/H.  Click on the "Citing references" in the left column to do a citation search.  Search results default to keyword-in-context view, which is ideal to detect relevancy.  Campus Research includes all E.U. materiels and some U.K. law, in addition to U.S..

Law reviews, the proper term for scholarly legal journals, may show up within the citation searches in either of the above databases.  However, to cover the literature, you should also do a separate search in Legal Periodicals Full Text, a database of law reviews.

Both L/N and Westlaw Campus Reserach have "natural language" search capabilities, although both default to a connector-based search form.  Legal Periodicals Full Text, on the other hand, has only the connector-based search form.  Therefore, the next page will deal with using connectors in a search strategy.

legalonline3.html 20090821